This doesn't help

Obama, Boehner issue ultimatums that get us nowhere.

The two most visible figures in the U.S. debt crisis, House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama, are busy playing 2012 politics. So busy that they're overlooking four inconvenient truths:

• Our federal government isn't merely stuck with almost $15 trillion in debt. That debt grows by some $4 billion a day or, if this is easier to grasp, some $3 million every minute.

• One continent to the east, Greece and a cluster of other nations that foolishly chose not to keep their debt loads sustainable are edging closer to default. Remember, one ratings agency already has downgraded U.S. creditworthiness — and, this summer, the prospect of more downgrades briefly united our political class around a deal to avoid that grim fate.

• That slashing of U.S. deficits has to include substantial constraints on future entitlement spending — the biggest driver in the federal budget — as well as higher revenues. Our oft-stated preference: a spending-cuts-to-higher-revenues ratio of 3- or 4-to-1.

• The most inconvenient truth for Washington pols: The American people expect members of Congress and the president to solve this unfolding crisis before it further dims America's economic future.

Instead of solutions, though, citizens get election-cycle rhetoric.

Boehner didn't help move Washington and the nation closer to a meaningful deficits deal with his insistence Thursday that tax increases cannot be part of it. Nor did Obama help Monday with his one-upmanship of Boehner's irresponsible ultimatum: The president said he will veto any bill that lowers Medicare benefits but doesn't raise taxes on the wealthy. His retreat from specific entitlement reforms he tacitly endorsed this summer in effect says the greatest threat to government solvency isn't as important as his re-election.

If the problem Boehner and Obama aren't fixing was less momentous, we could dismiss their theatrics as their opening positions in negotiations. Each man wants to be seen by his party's purist base as a tough guy who won't get pummeled in deficit reduction bargaining.

Except … wait … Boehner and Obama aren't negotiating. They failed to reach a grand bargain this summer. So they're sidelined, demoted from players to yell leaders — a term we hadn't heard before learning that Republican presidential aspirant Rick Perry used to be one at Texas A&M University.

No, the job of reaching a long-range deficit deal instead rests, for now, with the so-called "supercommittee" of Congress — a bipartisan, bicameral group of 12 lawmakers tasked to deliver results by Nov. 23, nine weeks from Wednesday.

That urgency, coupled with the posturing of Boehner and Obama, gives supercommittee members reason to infer a two-rule mandate from the American people:

Ignore Boehner.

Ignore Obama.

During negotiations over the summer, Boehner seemed open to raising revenue through tax reform. He still wants tax reform, but seems unwilling now to include any revenue increases in a debt deal.

Obama signaled this summer that he could accept such meaningful entitlement reforms as changes to future Social Security benefits and raising the age of eligibility for Medicare. Yet the plan he announced Monday excluded Social Security reform and included only slow-mo trims to Medicare — with recipients immune from impacts until 2017. It doesn't help that a big part of Obama's proposed deficit reductions would come from the wind-down of military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we and others noted when Senate Democrats tried that same gimmick this summer: The Pentagon already has baked a good chunk of those savings into its future budgets. The White House can't count those savings twice.

The president's plan does include such necessary changes as reductions in agricultural subsidies and other program spending. But here the White House is fiddling at the government's petty cash drawer. Without much bolder reductions in entitlement spending, and without the sort of extensive tax reform his own debt commission recommended last winter, the president comes across as a politician focused mostly on the next election.

This volley of ultimatums from Boehner and Obama illustrates why Democrats wanted a summer deficit reduction deal that would postpone any further focus on federal debt until after that 2012 election. Instead we'll now endure an acrimonious fight over debt and deficits — likely until Election Day.

All the more reason for the supercommittee members to reach their own substantial bargain on tax reform and spending reductions. The bigger the deficit reductions, the better.

Trouble is, Boehner and Obama are making it more difficult, not less so, for the supercommittee to reach that solution.